Meta Comment:

Thanks again, everybody that voted! If you want to check out the anonymized ballot information and inspect the code I used to process the votes, you can find a repository I made here.

Total turnout this year (~25 votes) was down quite a bit compared to last year (~90 votes). I think there were a couple contributing factors to this:

• The private-message voting system was new, and I don’t think it seems like it was popular. Last year I had run a survey site that lets people fill out a web form for their vote. However, the software was really flaky on the backend side of things and I didn’t want to run it again. Also, there was not really any way to prevent somebody from voting multiple times because I couldn’t tie a vote to a user account.
• Last year’s voting period happened over the holidays, and I suspect that boosted turnout.
• I think total overall activity is down compared to a year ago, especially so since we are in the middle of a season. The active user count always tends to tick up when a new season kicks off, but then falls back down a bit to coast until the next season sees another bit of a spike. So, doing these awards in the middle of a season probably didn’t help turnout.

Please feel free to let me know if you have any ideas for improvement in the future. Whether that is about the voting process, nomination process, timing, whatever…

As for the award winners, there were a couple titles that really soaked up lots of votes in any category they were nominated for. Specifically, CITY, Apocalypse Hotel, and Chainsaw Man - Reze Arc got a huge portion of the voteshare whenever they were nominated. So, if there is any takeaway from these awards for me, it’s that those are this community’s standout favorites from last year.

Other interesting things I noticed:

• I was glad to see Ninkoro doing so well in the Best Comedy category. I loved the dark humor in that series so much, and the anime really elevated the source material in lots of ways. Glad to see others agreed!
• I was also happy to see Rock is a Lady’s Modesty do well in the OST category. It’s always nice when an anime about music actually has good music in it.
• I found it interesting that Maomao absolutely ran away with the voting for best Voice Acting, but she didn’t even make the nomination list for best character. In fact, Shisui received more nominations than Maomao for best character.